New rule could prevent website owners from protecting their identity

A new rule over domain registration would prevent people from using a third party to sign up for a commercial website. People often use proxies to protect their contact information from the public, particularly when their work is controversial.

Under the new rules, people registering websites for non-personal
purposes would have to disclose their name, address and phone
number, all of which could be easily searchable by anyone. The
plan has privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF) opposed to the idea and alarmed that website
owners could “suffer a higher risk of harassment,
intimidation and identify theft.”

“The ability to speak anonymously protects people with
unpopular or marginalized opinions, allowing them to speak and be
heard without fear of harm. It also protects whistleblowers who
expose crime, waste, and corruption,” wrote EFF in a statement.

At first blush, the change would seem to only affect commercial
website registration. But a personally created website that
offers a community benefit, but also features ads to help defray
the costs of running the site, could be judged as commercial, and
has been in past domain name disputes.

It is not clear yet if the organization that oversees the
bureaucratic process of naming online domains, the International
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will include
the broader definition of commercial in the new rules.

ICANN
has put up the rules forpublic
commentuntil July
7. To date, thousands of people have logged comments.

One individual named
Brad urged ICANN to “respect internet users’ rights to
privacy and due process … Private information should be kept
private.”

Another, Sarah Brown,
told ICANN that her websites allow her to earn a living full-time
online, but she has been stalked, harassed, and had content from
her site stolen. She uses a third-party proxy to prevent people
from finding her sites, her home address and phone number.

“I implore you to think through the
consequences of removing our private WHOIS information. It serves
as a buffer to protect us from the crazy people in this
world,”wrote
Brown. “We are
living in unsafe times, where jealousy and greed overtake
compassion and ethics. We are real people, with real lives, who
can end up in real danger with our information in the wrong
hands.”

Carlton Samuels told ICANN that the new rules balanced rights and
responsibilities, and “is a most important piece of work
which…advances us closer to the goal of reforming certain domain
name market practices and the environment.”

Other writers were less helpful, with Professor Randal Vaughn
writing simply, “I could care but I don't.”

ICANN said the rule change is being driven by discussions with
law enforcement. EFF said it is also being driven by US
entertainment companies and others who want new tools to discover
the identities of website owners and then accuse them of
copyright and trademark infringement, without a court order. US
entertainment companies told Congress in March that privacy for
domain registration should be allowed only in “limited
circumstances”.